


Cheap Dental Floss

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-24
Updated: 2014-05-24
Packaged: 2018-01-26 08:10:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1681097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wouldn't it just be easier if we all came from the mud?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cheap Dental Floss

There's something embedded in my chest, deeper, deeper than my skin, my ribcage, my lungs. Aching and tearing at my flesh from the inside out to such an extent that I can feel the blood seeping through me, dripping slowly in the dark places where it should never run. Sensing the danger of it makes me feel more alive, closer to death. 

I can ignore it for a while. Drown the sensation in cold cups of tea, stitch the small and perfect incisions with the cheap dental floss you buy. It doesn't last, it doesn't hold. 

It'll do for now. 

The burning becomes softer after a time, something buryable. I find a place in my mind and dig, my arms stiffening, the dirt getting trapped in all the small spaces under my fingernails, under my tongue. I dig further until everything becomes cold and then hot again, searing and searing and I imagine it's blistering my skin but everything else is immaterial, everything else will heal. When the crater is large enough, deep enough, I throw the burn into the centre of the earth and further, the softness of it becoming agony as I tear it from my chest. 

I return the soil for neatness but it leaves an ugly scar on the surface. Similar, perhaps, to when one returns a body to the earth. Bury, bury, bury. 

I won't mourn this. 

And despite the fact that all the stars we have been made privy to watched me smother this, when your eyes connect with something in my skull I still remember the blood, the hollow memory of pain. An echo of what I allowed you to, before. 

And you look, look and breathe and speak understand me unconditionally, like even I can't. I stand alone with only my ankles to support me, but only for a short while. Something ruptures somewhere, and all at once the soil is unturned and the fresh rain of something else soaks me so I am standing in this inescapable downpour and all I can do is watch helplessly on as something blunt and dry pushes through my heart, my lungs, my ribcage, my skin. You don't seem to notice. I'm gasping for air. I'm not breathing at all. 

But, you see, I am untouchable, I am above, I am mind and intellect, I am rapid speech with no words, I am spiked and not quite whole, I am better, I am- I am unlovable. So I ignore it, I ignore it but it gets harder to breathe. 

This facade I have convinced myself with shatters completely, but you don't yet see me. I'm waiting for you to understand it was only a crack, only one more fragment but it sent the entire mechanics of me crashing into something crumpled and irretrievable. It was only a splinter. 

A splinter- a splinter in my heart

 

(you).


End file.
